A fear of dark water

Chapter Twenty

Anna Wolff stood by the window of Fabel’s office, looking out across the dark shapes of the trees in Winterhude Stadtpark. Outside, the light was fading but the sky, now clear of clouds, was a sheet of dark blue silk.

‘That was a long coffee break…’ She turned when Fabel came into the office.

‘What’s this? You our new time-and-motion monitor?’ He sat down behind his desk. ‘I’ve just had a very interesting chat with Fabian Menke of the BfV. About the Pharos Project.’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. That and what Technical Section have retrieved from the computers we seized this afternoon.’ Anna tapped a document folder on Fabel’s desk. ‘Interim stuff. As we speak, geeks are burrowing deeper and deeper into silicon.’ She imitated a small crawling animal, wrinkling her nose.

‘Anything hopeful?’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ she sighed. ‘It looks like these guys are clean. Weird, but clean. Of course, we did come up one computer short.’

‘I couldn’t take it away from him, Anna. If you had been there…’ Fabel frowned. ‘Actually, no… if you’d been there you would have taken it. And probably confiscated his wheelchair, too.’

‘We really do need to check it out,’ said Anna. ‘Even if he is physically unlikely to be a suspect, there may be something in his interactions with the victims that could give us something.’

‘I’m well aware of that, Anna. I’ve arranged to send one of Kroeger’s people around to Reisch’s home to check the computer.’ Fabel picked up the folder and flicked through the report inside. ‘I guess we just have to keep plugging away. Hit the next bunch of IP addresses.’

‘We could be at that for ever,’ said Anna.

‘It’s all we’ve got,’ said Fabel. He nodded to the chair opposite. ‘Sit down, Anna.’

‘I’m okay,’ she said absently. ‘I’d rather stand. I’ve been sitting all day and my leg stiffens up a bit.’

For a split second, Fabel found himself lost for words. Anna picked up on it.

‘Jan,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. I wish we could stop dancing around this. It wasn’t your fault.’

He stared at the report in front of him, more to avoid making eye contact with Anna than to study the file’s contents.

‘It was my fault,’ he said. ‘I was in command. Just like I was the night Paul was killed.’

‘This is a dangerous business, Jan. I know that and Paul knew that. You can’t legislate for every eventuality.’

‘I dream about him all the time,’ Fabel said in a flat, quiet voice. ‘Nearly every week or couple of weeks. Always the same dream. We’re always in my father’s study, up in my parents’ house in Norddeich, and Paul talks to me. Not about anything important or significant. He just sits there and chats to me. But I know he’s dead. He has the wound in his head and sometimes he explains that it’s difficult for him to have an opinion or perspective on whatever it is we’re talking about, because he’s dead.’

‘I thought all the dreams had stopped,’ said Anna.

‘That’s what I tell Susanne. The official line. It’s tough living with a psychologist. I don’t know if she believes me, but that’s what I tell her. The point is, I know that if I had done things differently Paul would be alive, Maria Klee wouldn’t be in a mental hospital and you wouldn’t have got shot.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry — can we drop it?’

‘You’re the boss.’ Anna smiled at him. ‘About the Pharos Project, if I show you mine will you show me yours?’

‘Go ahead…’ Fabel leaned back in his chair.

‘I don’t know why you wanted me to look into this for you, but I’ve been hearing some very dodgy things about Pharos. And — how you knew I won’t ask — but there is a connection with the murders.’

Fabel looked stunned.

‘You did ask me to look at this because there’s some kind of connection?’ asked Anna.

‘No… no, not at all — like I told you, it’s something unrelated.’

‘Then it’s quite some coincidence,’ said Anna. ‘It took a bit of unravelling, but Dominik Korn, who heads the Pharos Project, also heads the consortium that owns and operates Virtual Dimension, the simulated-reality game that all the victims were logged into. So why were you interested in Pharos?’

‘A long shot… I thought there might be a link to the other body we found. The wash-up.’ Fabel sighed. ‘There’s a woman who seems to have gone missing: Meliha Yazar. I think there may be a link to the Pharos Project. She might have been investigating them.’

‘What have you got yourself into, Jan?’ Anna left the window, came over to Fabel’s desk and leaned on it, the concern in her expression genuine.

‘Something I maybe shouldn’t have,’ he said, and meant it. ‘I got talked into it by Berthold Muller-Voigt. This is strictly between us, Anna…’

She nodded.

‘Muller-Voigt is involved with this woman…’ began Fabel.

‘And half the female population of Hamburg, from what I’ve heard,’ said Anna.

‘It’s not like that. Muller-Voigt is nuts about this woman. And he is really concerned about her disappearance.’ Fabel sketched out some of what had passed between him and the Environment Senator.

‘You know,’ said Anna when he was finished, ‘I think I’d better sit down after all. You have no idea what I found out about Pharos. If Muller-Voigt’s latest squeeze really was investigating them, then she could well have got out of her depth. The Pharos Project is the brainchild of Dominik Korn. Have you heard of him?’

‘Not until Muller-Voigt mentioned him to me,’ said Fabel.

‘That’s hardly surprising. Dominik Korn is one of the world’s richest men — worth billions, as is his deputy, Peter Wiegand — but he’s also one of the world’s most reclusive men. No one outside Wiegand and his circle of closest advisers has had contact with him for years. Occasionally he will take part in video conferences with other key people in his business empire. He lives on a massive yacht. And I mean massive. It would make the average Russian oligarch feel inadequate.’

‘Why is he so reclusive?’

‘Apparently he had a diving accident that caused him to have some kind of cataclysmic stroke brought on by severe decompression sickness and other complications. He shouldn’t be alive; it was a miracle that he survived it, but it’s left him in the same kind of condition as the guy you interviewed earlier today. Since then he’s needed round-the-clock care.’

‘And he’s also head of this cult?’

‘Guru number one, apparently. He may sound like a nut-job, but he’s said to be as rich in brains as he is in cash. His IQ is said to be off the scale. He studied…’ Anna referred to her notebook ‘… oceanography, hydrology and environmental science in the United States — he has dual German and US citizenship, by the way — then did a doctoral thesis in hydrology, and then went on to become a hydrometeorologist.’ She looked at her notes again. ‘ Studying the interaction between large bodies of water and the climate. Korn became the world’s leading expert on ecohydrology. That’s what he was doing when he had his accident. He had designed this unique submersible for research work and was taking it on its maiden dive when it all went tits-up.’

‘His accident?’

‘And his epiphany, apparently.’

‘Yes…’ said Fabel. ‘Muller-Voigt made mention of some kind of revelation at the bottom of the sea.’

‘Right up until the accident, the Pharos Project had been an oceanographic research study. Korn had poured millions of his own money into it. It was examining the environmental impact of various human activities at the deepest ocean levels. Then, after his accident and the damage it did to him, Korn changed the nature of the Pharos Project. To start with it became a lobbying body, campaigning against oil exploration in deeper waters. It gained a lot of credibility after the BP thing in the Gulf of Mexico. Then Korn approved members of Pharos getting involved in protests and direct action. After that, about nine months after his accident, Korn started to talk about his epiphany and what it meant.’

‘Which was?’

‘All his adult life, Dominik Korn had positioned himself as a disciple of deep ecology — apparently that means he believed that human beings shouldn’t see themselves as distinct from the ecosystem and that they should work to shape the environment sympathetically while preserving biodiversity, all that sort of stuff. But after his accident he totally rejected the concept of deep ecology and started spouting his theories of disengagement. He claimed his experience five thousand metres down had revealed some kind of universal truth to him.’

‘Don’t they all,’ said Fabel. ‘Going by the number of cults there are, there must be a hell of a lot of universal truths.’

‘Well, Korn’s particular revelation was that he had been damaged because he had been a human in an environment humans had no place being. The philosophy of the Pharos Project is that mankind should remove itself from the environment.’ Anna shrugged. ‘This disengagement he talks about.’

‘Where did you get all this stuff?’

‘The federal boys,’ said Anna. ‘I’ve got a contact there. An ex-boyfriend, actually. He was pretty cagey. He said this was a big thing for the BfV. The French security services and the American FBI are all over the Pharos Project too, apparently. He doesn’t know exactly what it is about it that’s flipped their switches, but the Pharos Project is on all kinds of hot lists.’

‘So I gather. Your sniffing around on my behalf was noticed.’

‘Menke?’

‘Yep. He knew all about your enquiries. Your ex-boyfriend was obviously so cagey that he felt he needed to cover his back.’

‘So what did Menke tell you?’ asked Anna.

‘Less than you’ve told me, but enough for me to see that if Meliha Yazar had been snooping around Pharos, then Muller-Voigt might be right about her being in danger. Menke’s promised to send me some information over later.’

‘But?’ Anna raised an eyebrow.

‘But I think our interest is unwelcome. To be fair, I haven’t confided in Menke about Muller-Voigt or his concerns about Meliha Yazar. Menke did tell me that the Pharos Project meets all the criteria of a destructive cult. Particularly its dictatorial control over its members. Menke wasn’t too specific, but it seems it’s the same old thing: conversion becomes indoctrination becomes brainwashing. He did say that Korn has added his own twists here and there. The other thing that distinguishes Pharos is its financial clout. The inner chamber of the Project are all board members of the various companies in the Korn business empire. And from what you’ve said, that includes the developers of Virtual Dimension.’

‘Maybe we should make your unofficial snooping into Meliha Yazar an official investigation. If you think she might be the wash-up. We could get familial DNA…’

Fabel shook his head. ‘It’s not as straightforward as that… Anyway, I still think it might be a wild-goose chase.’ He looked at his watch and saw it was eleven-thirty. ‘It’s late. I’m heading home. We’ll pick this up in the morning.’

Fabel tried ringing Susanne’s cellphone again as he came out of the elevator and crossed the Presidium’s basement garage. He cursed when he once more got her answering service: he left a message, telling her that this was his temporary cell number and asking her to check in with him.

Fabel hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and he didn’t feel like cooking for himself so he decided to eat somewhere on the way home. Driving through the night-time city, his mind wandered and ranged over everything that had happened over the last forty-eight hours. Two bodies in the water. Two different MOs. He guessed that the press would be all over the second body by the morning and van Heiden would be on the phone to him again to state the obvious. But the strange thing was that his conversation of the night before with Muller-Voigt, and everything he had found out since about the Pharos Project, were what really haunted his thoughts.

It was only after Fabel stopped his BMW that he realised what he had done. It had been as if he had been on autopilot. He had driven down to the harbour. He knew why he had done it and he felt a leaden sadness coalesce in his chest. He had been working late and had wanted to eat something on the way home so, as he had so many times before, he had driven down to the harbour to buy a beer and something hot to eat from Stellamanns’ Schnell-Imbiss snack bar.

Dirk Stellamanns had run the harbourside snack stand since his retirement from the Polizei Hamburg. Like Fabel, Dirk was a Frisian by birth and, as the experienced officer, he had shown Fabel the ropes when he had first entered the service. He had taken him under his wing, and the two had only ever talked to each other in Frisian Low Saxon. Throughout the years, and despite Fabel’s rise through the ranks, the two men had remained close. Then, after his retirement, Dirk had set up his immaculately kept snack stand — a caravan with a serving window and canopy and surrounded by parasol-topped waist-high tables — smack bang in the middle of what had been his old beat, in the shadow of the dockside cranes that loomed above it.

Fabel visited regularly to grab a beer and something to eat, particularly when something was troubling him. Seeing Dirk, and hearing his accent that was as broad and flat as the landscape they had both grown up in, had always cheered Fabel up. Stellamanns had been that kind of man: no matter what life had thrown at him, he always seemed to remain cheerily philosophical about it.

Fabel stepped out of his car, stood in an illuminated pool of cobbled road, and looked over to a vacant patch of scrubland next to the dock road.

The summer before, on a particularly hot day, Dirk had been doing his best business of the season. He had built up a huge clientele of lorry drivers who would stop on their way into or out of the docks. He had been working over the stove when it happened: a massive heart attack that had killed him before he hit the caravan floor.

For those few minutes while his mind had been preoccupied with other things Dirk had still been alive in Fabel’s subconscious, his snack stand still open for business as usual.

The world was changing around Fabel. And, like everyone else, he sometimes lost track of the changes. People he had thought of as constants, as always being there, suddenly were no longer there. It depressed and annoyed him that, for a moment, he had forgotten that Dirk had died. He had often done the same thing when he had thought of his childhood home in Norddeich; that his long-dead father was in fact still alive and sitting in his study, bent over some old map of the coast, his glasses perched precariously on the tip of his nose. It was what you did: you had an entire universe in your head, the one you grew up with, and it stayed there, unchanged.

‘It’s not here any more.’

Fabel turned, startled. The young woman had stepped out from nowhere and into the pool of light. He looked up and down the roadway but could see no sign of another parked car.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It’s not here any more,’ the young woman repeated. ‘The snack stand.’

‘Oh… yes. Yes, I know.’

‘I was looking for it myself,’ she said. For a moment Fabel wondered if she was a prostitute, even though this was not one of the regulated areas. But she was smartly dressed in a dark grey jacket-and-skirt business suit and court shoes, as if she worked in a bank or insurance company. She had neat, shortish blonde hair and regular features: attractive but not particularly memorable.

‘It’s not been here for a while,’ said Fabel.

‘Nor have I,’ she said.

‘Where are you parked?’ asked Fabel. ‘I didn’t see…’

‘Oh, over there…’ She made a vague gesture with her hand, indicating further down the road towards the docks. ‘Are you a policeman?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘It’s just that “ Where are you parked? ” is a very policeman kind of thing to ask. And the guy who ran the stand was an ex-policeman. He used to get a lot of his former colleagues as customers. And you don’t look like a trucker.’

‘I guess not. What brings you down here?’

‘Like I said, I was looking for the Schnell-Imbiss myself. I was peckish.’

‘It’s a bit out of the way.’

‘Nowhere is really out of the way. Did you know him well? The guy with the stall, I mean?’

‘Very.’

‘He was a nice man,’ she said. ‘He was very…’ she struggled for the right word ‘… avuncular.’

Fabel realised he was feeling increasingly uneasy. There was something about the girl that disturbed him. It was almost as if she was flirting with him, but the lack of expression in her face made him think of Reisch, the man with the wheelchair and a terrifyingly clear view of his immediate future.

‘I still don’t really understand what you are doing here,’ he said. He took out his police ID and flipped it open. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to see your card.’

‘And if I do mind?’

‘I’d still like to see it.’

‘I don’t understand why you’re so concerned about me being here. I’m not the one who’s living in the past, forgetting that their friend is dead.’

Fabel stiffened a little. ‘Okay, let me see your ID card.’

‘Certainly, officer.’ She smiled, but it was an artifice, something done because it was expected. She reached into her shoulder bag and handed him her Personal Identification Card. It told Fabel that she was Julia Helling, from Eppendorf. ‘I was just making conversation. Have I done something wrong?’

‘No, Frau Helling. It’s just that you should be more careful. This is a lonely spot at night and you shouldn’t be here on your own.’

‘I’m not on my own, am I? I have police protection. Or are you worried that I’ve made a date on the internet with the Network Killer?’

‘Now that’s a very odd thing to say.’

‘Is it? It’s just with your concern for my safety… he’s very much in the news at the moment.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, I won’t disturb you any longer. Good night, Chief Commissar.’

‘How do you know my rank?’

She shrugged. ‘Your ID. It was on it. Good night. I hope you find somewhere to eat.’

Fabel watched as she walked off into the dark. Getting back into his BMW, he phoned the Police Presidium and gave the name and address in Eppendorf that the girl had given him. The control room told him the name and address checked out and she had no known record. Waiting for a moment before starting up, Fabel headed down towards the docks, in the direction she had taken, driving slowly to make sure she had got back to her car. It took him only three or four minutes to reach a dead end of closed dock gates.

No sign of her. And no car had passed him in the opposite direction.